Carolina Planning Journal

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Tag: Resilience

New Website Highlights Communities’ Perspectives on Urban Renewal

November 11, 2021 /
By Lindsay Oluyede

Between 1955 and 1966, U.S. cities reported displacing approximately a third of a million families for urban renewal projects. As noted by researchers at the University of Richmond, their homes were razed to clear land for redevelopment that included “new, sometimes public housing, more often private, or for other purposes like the development of department stores or office buildings.”[i] The displaced families were disproportionately African-American. In 1961, 66% of residents of areas marked for urban renewal projects were African-American, though they made up 10% of the U.S. population at that time.[ii]

Undoubtedly, these communities were forever changed. Recently, efforts to understand the experience of the residents whose neighborhoods were lost to urban renewal have occurred. Around the country, universities, local libraries, and historical societies are documenting the stories of these communities and their residents.

A new website, Urban Renewal: In Retro (www.urbanrenewalstories.com), brings together multimedia projects that tell the story of communities impacted by urban renewal. The features of the website include:

  • Interactive Map: A Google map that compiles projects about the impact of urban renewal on communities around the country. The projects include oral histories, documentary films, museum exhibits, etc.
  • Learn More: A list of resources about the urban renewal era. 
  • Submit a Project: An online form to share similar projects that can be added to the map.
Remembering the Past for a Resilient Future

These projects offer a perspective on urban renewal from the voices of the people who lived through it. The communities displaced by urban renewal faced immediate and enduring consequences, including the trauma of moving involuntarily and the lingering loss of community.

Community trauma and resilience—the ability to respond and adapt to new circumstances—are inextricably connected:

“…improving resilience requires intervening in that cycle of unacknowledged community trauma. A legitimate intervention into this cycle depends upon public knowledge, public understanding, and public acknowledgement of past events in order to avoid repeating oppression, injustice, and mistakes, and revictimizing communities and individuals still affected by the wrong.” [iii]

The motivation to create Urban Renewal: In Retro stems from the desire to encourage conversations about community displacement and resilience, and hopefully inspire future policies and planning that support more just and equitable outcomes.

[i] Digital Scholarship Lab, “Renewing Inequality,” American Panorama, ed. Robert K. Nelson and Edward L. Ayers, accessed October 31, 2021.

[ii] Fullilove, M.T. (2001). Root shock: The consequences of African American dispossession. Journal of Urban Health 78, 72–80. 

[iii] Dukes, E. F., Williams, J., and Kelban, S. (2012). Collective Transitions and Community Resilience in the Face of Enduring Trauma. In Goldstein B. (Ed.), Collaborative Resilience: Moving Through Crisis to Opportunity. The MIT Press.

Lindsay Oluyede is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of City and Regional Planning. As a researcher, she unearths empirical insights from diverse perspectives to inform policy recommendations to improve transportation equity. Lindsay created Urban Renewal: In Retro while participating in the Maynard Adams Fellowship for the Public Humanities program.

Edited by Jo Kwon

Featured image: Map of urban renewal storytelling projects. Courtesy of Lindsay Oluyede.

Equity and Adaptation in a Changing Climate: The UNC Climate Change Resilience Symposium

May 10, 2019 /

“If you had a town of 50,000 burned to the ground and hundreds of people killed by terrorists, do you think we would have done something about it by now?” It’s a provocative question, one of many raised at last month’s Climate Resilience Symposium. The person asking the question was Brigadier General Stephen A. Cheney of the US Marine Corps, and, perhaps surprisingly, he was talking about climate change. Specifically, he was discussing last year’s wildfires that devastated the town of Paradise, CA and the inability of our political system to come to terms with the immense security and economic threat posed by climate change.

The UNC Climate Change and Resilience Symposium is an annual event at UNC organized by the Carolina Resilience Hazard Planners and Carolina Climate Scientists and hosted by the Gillings School of Public Health. The event brings together community activists, practitioners, and scholars from around the Triangle region to discuss the impacts of climate change as well as the challenges and opportunities in addressing it in North Carolina and beyond.

CCRS keynote 1

Brigadier General Stephen A. Cheney, Keynote Speaker. Source: Josh Kastrinsky.

The day’s activities kicked off with General Cheney’s key note address. Retired from the Marines, General Cheney is currently the Chief Executive Officer of the American Security Project, a nonprofit policy and research organization founded by John Kerry to address underappreciated threats to national security like climate change. The goal of General Cheney’s address was to highlight both the direct impacts of climate change to military bases and infrastructure, as well as its indirect role in prompting widespread migration and political destabilization. Cheney presented Lake Chad in central Africa as a classic example. The lake has lost 90% of its water since 1973, driving a regional migration network, which terrorist organization Boko Haram has taken advantage of for active recruitment. Similarly, analysts project that one to two feet of sea level rise could prompt the relocation of 20-30 million refugees from Bangladesh, many of whom are expected to end up in Indonesia, which has a large ISIS footprint. On the home front, Cheney discussed the impacts of sea level rise and extreme weather on Norfolk, home to the world’s largest naval base, and on North Carolina’s Camp Lejeune, which he described as a “blue tarp city” following Hurricane Florence. Similarly, Tyndall Airforce base in Florida, one of the nation’s most important training bases, is expected to take at least five years to come back online following Hurricane Michael. But “why would you possibly put it in the same spot?” Cheney asked regarding Congress’s decision to rebuild Tyndall rather than relocate it to a lower-risk area. According to Cheney, the military gets it. They see the risk climate change poses and the opportunities in adaptation and mitigation activities. It’s up to us as voters, he stressed, to get our politicians on the same page.

After Cheney’s keynote and an engaging student poster session over lunch, there were two afternoon panels. The first – Climate Change Adaptation: Communities at a Crossroads – featured four experts on climate adaptation and planning in North Carolina. They discussed local climate resilience assessment projects and how to integrate local planning with regional, state, and federal efforts. Two recurring themes were the challenge of getting local government to understand the urgency of climate change and the tension between private property, individual choice, and public interest. As Stewart consultant, Jay McLeod, argued, when it comes to coastal development, we need to get “a place where the cost burden isn’t borne externally and a place where people actually understand their risk.” Key takeaways from the panel included recognizing the need for transformation in the existing climate change response approach and greater representation and diversity in the decision-making and planning process. Jessica Whitehead of North Carolina Sea Grant perhaps said it best: “adaptation just requires doing things differently.”

CCRS Second Panel 1

UNC PhD student, Amanda Martin, presenting at the first panel session. Source: Josh Kastrinsky.

Another thread through the entire afternoon was the issue of equity. When discussing existing land use strategies for reducing risk in the first panel, UNC PhD student, Amanda Martin, reminded the audience that the US has a “long history of forcing people to move for the ‘greater’ good” and discussed how our current adaptation strategies “continue to perpetuate structures of inequality.” That conversation continued into the second panel – Striving for Equity in the Face of a Changing Climate – with North Carolina State Professors Kofi Boone and Ryan Emanuel, both of whom sought to complicate and reframe the existing narrative around climate change and vulnerable communities. Professor Boone argued that it’s chronic stressors and underlying issues, like racism and poverty, which drive vulnerability and which our current adaptation strategies fail to address. A large part of the problem, he stated, is that poor black communities on the coastal plain of North Carolina are “feeling the impact of our bad development decisions” up in the wealthier Triangle region. However, that same history of exclusion has created a strong attachment to place and valuable social ties in many black communities that make relocation difficult. Dr. Emanuel, an enrolled member of the Lumbee tribe, addressed similar issues as they relate to native communities. He explored the Lumbee’s historical connection to the land and the tribe’s history of migration in response to environmental conditions AND forced displacement. Those experiences, he argued, make the Lumbee particularly vulnerable to climate change. However, they also make the Lumbee uniquely positioned to address it IF decision makers better recognize and incorporate indigenous knowledge and expertise in environmental justice and climate adaptation efforts.

CCRS Third Panel 2.jpg

North Carolina State Professors Kofi Boone and Ryan Emanuel discussing equity and climate change during the second panel session. Source: Josh Kastrinsky.

Both speakers on the second panel argued that our current paradigm, reflected in the existing strategies and narratives adopted around climate change adaptation, focuses on rational decision making at the individual level. However, that paradigm ignores community-level social forces that can limit mobility or, on the flip side, create social capital that can help generate innovative forms of resilience. In addition, our current paradigm too often focuses on cities or high-income coastal areas, ignoring rural communities like those found in the North Carolina coastal plain. As Professor Boone stressed, “we need to evolve a different unit of organization” in our hazard mitigation and disaster recovery efforts.

The final panelists closed the productive day of conversations and learning with a few key tips for working on these sensitive and timely issues, particularly in vulnerable communities:

  • Know when (and even if) to get involved
  • Listen, build relationships, and be willing to put in the time
  • Don’t go in looking for certain things or treating the exchange like an extractive process
  • Marry social issues like poverty that people relate to and experience on a day-to-day basis to conversations around adaptation and climate change

 

Featured Image: Brigadier General Stephen A. Cheney, keynote speaker, presenting to the attending audience. Source: Josh Kastrinsky.

About the Author: Leah Campbell is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Department of City and Regional Planning, where she focuses on integrating equity and resilience into climate adaptation to address urban flooding. Prior to UNC, she worked in the environmental nonprofit sector in California after receiving her B.S. in Geophysics and Environmental Science from Yale in 2015. Outside of academics, Leah enjoys folk music, long road trips, and anything that gets her outside.

Hazard Mitigation and Hurricane Harvey: Reflections on a Conversation with Dr. Galen Newman

October 30, 2018 /

The following is derived from an interview about the 2017 disaster with Dr. Galen Newman, a Fellow in the Institute for Sustainable Communities and a member of the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center at Texas A&M University. His research focuses primarily on urban regeneration and flood resilience.

Harvey was different. While many hurricanes pose serious flooding risks to coastal areas, the danger often lies in the rapid rise of seawater known as a storm surge. There is a reason that Harvey’s storm surge was hardly mentioned in the weeks and months following its landfall: the most serious flooding was caused by excessive rain. In an area that is accustomed to only 50 inches of precipitation annually, Harvey’s nearly 48 inches of rainfall was devastating. This inundation of water posed a completely different set of challenges for the Houston area.

Harvey’s Uniqueness

Accordingly, it was nearly impossible for authorities to plan for the 2017 hurricane. The unique nature of the storm resulted in an unprecedented strain on Harris County’s stormwater infrastructure system. Due to relentless and widespread rainfall, one-quarter of the resultant flooding occurred in areas outside of the 100-year floodplain. The new and unpredictable pattern of flooding had catastrophic effects on some Houstonians. Flood insurance is not required outside of designated floodplains and as a result, many of those whose property was damaged or destroyed were forced to start over from square one.

While Harvey was a particularly devastating event, Houston was previously vulnerable to any major rain, storm, or hurricane occurrence. The relaxed regulation of land use zoning and widespread development (much of it within existing floodplains) meant that a substantial amount of land was covered by impervious surfaces like concrete and asphalt. Weep holes—the gaps within brick walls that allow for drainage and ventilation—were easily clogged. Combined with relative inattention to stormwater infrastructure, these practices led to inadequate drainage in neighborhoods all over Harris County.

Keeping it Local

Preparing for the next big storm must be undertaken by planners and policymakers at all levels of government and private enterprise. While large-scale infrastructure improvements and national or state hazard mitigation plans can be helpful, it is critical to focus on smaller scale issues that could endanger individual communities and neighborhoods. This is especially salient when addressing issues in underserved communities. For example, some lower-income neighborhoods in Houston were especially vulnerable because of their open ditch drainage system and their proximity to industrial sites that could potentially contaminate floodwaters. Local issues like this are easy to gloss over at the national level. It is critical for lawmakers and planners to address the issues and concerns of individual communities and neighborhoods while drawing up large-scale mitigation plans.

There is also much to be done at a more regional level. The Texas Department of Transportation is keeping this in mind with long-term infrastructure projects, such as a redesign of highway 45 that will integrate detention ponds and pumps to prevent highway flooding like what occurred during Harvey1. The goal is to prepare for the 100-year storm, which may be insufficient given that Harvey was a 500-year storm and these kinds of events are projected to happen more frequently in the coming years.

Key Takeaways

The storm’s aftermath forced cities all over the country to take a more critical look at their respective infrastructure and hazard mitigation plans. Cities have begun encouraging sustainable development that reduces the negative impacts on natural hydrology and drainage. Changes can also be seen in floodplain development. Building parks and other types of green infrastructure in floodplains prevents substantial losses while benefiting the local community. Buyouts in flood-prone areas becoming more common as well, as cities seek to move people and businesses from high-risk areas. While every storm is different, focusing on local issues as well as city and statewide mitigation plans puts cities in the most resilient position possible. With the negative consequences of climate change unlikely to halt anytime soon2, Houston will need to take an aggressive approach in order to lose its reputation as one of the most flood-prone cities in the United States3. 

Dr. Galen D. Newman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning at Texas A&M University (TAMU). At TAMU, he also serves as Associate Department Head, Coordinator of the Bachelor of Science in Urban Planning Program, Associate Director of the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center, and Discovery Lead for Community Resilience for the Institute for Sustainable Communities. His research interests include urban regeneration, land use science, spatial analytics, community flood resilience, and community/urban scaled design. His current research focuses on the integration of urban regeneration (the reuse of vacant properties in shrinking and growing cities) and urban flood resilience.

About the Author: Wayne Powell is a first year Master’s student specializing in transportation and housing/community development. He is a research assistant with the Center for Urban and Regional studies focusing on accessibility in public transit. He hopes to further his education and career in planning by studying how technology can be used to shape cities and their transportation networks.

  1. Delaughter, Gail. “Flood Control Is A Big Part of A Major Houston Transportation Project.” Houston Public Media, 24 Aug. 2018, www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/transportation/2018/08/24/301631/flood-control-is-a-big-part-of-a-major-houston-transportation-project/
  2. “IPCC Special Report Global Warming of 1.5ºC.” IPCC – Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 6 Aug. 2018, www.ipcc.ch/news_and_events/ma-p48.shtml.
  3. Satija, Neena. “Boomtown, Flood Town.” Scientific American, Springer Nature American, 8 Dec. 2016, www.scientificamerican.com/article/boomtown-flood-town/.

Featured Image: Cars floating down a flooded street in Houston, Texas. Photo credit: Dominick Del Vecchio, FEMA. 

 

Update 9.13: Hurricane Florence Information and Resources

September 11, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Key Points:

(1) The anticipated track of the storm has shifted south. This is a better situation for the Triangle than we have seen predicted over the last few days, but we are still expecting extreme weather. North Carolina will still be subject to flooding, storm surges, and heavy winds.

(2) The Triangle area is still at risk of flooding along rivers and ravines as well as in areas with poor draining. Check to see if your home or if the homes of family and friends are within a flood zone by looking up your address here (more tools available below). If you are in a flood risk area, plan to find alternative housing at the home of a friend or family member.

(3) It is still likely that the Triangle will experience high winds and extremely powerful gusts. Plan ahead for the possibility of losing power for multiple days.

11:00am Update from NHC Director Ken Graham

 

 

 

https://www.facebook.com/NWSNHC/videos/328321911272704/

Source: NOAA NWS National Hurricane Center Facebook

Comments on Preparation from Dr. Gavin Smith: 

I’m writing to all of you about the oncoming storm and a range of things you should be doing now to prepare for it.  Don’t be fooled into thinking that the storm won’t impact Chapel Hill.  While the track, associated winds, and rain are still uncertain, things are shaping up to be a bad combination of very strong inland winds and extreme rainfall.  In some ways it looks like a combined punch we experienced in 1996 with Fran (high inland winds led to power outages of up to a week in Chapel Hill and 2 weeks in Raleigh) and Floyd which had torrential rain, inundating the eastern third of the state.  Florence will have the high inland winds AND heavy rainfall as a high pressure ridge looks like it will block the storms movement once it makes landfall and rain may inundate the North Carolina Piedmont for 3 or 4 days.

Here are a few things all of you should do:

1) Pay close attention to the situation via the National Hurricane Center, Local News, and the Weather Channel.

2) Consider moving your car to an area that is safe from falling trees and branches and/or avoid being blocked in your driveway.  Parking decks and parking lots are an option (OUTSIDE OF THE FLOODPLAIN) to park your car if they are protected from flying debris.

3) Check to see where your home is located relative to the 100 and 500 year floodplain (for instance, Booker Creek is notorious for flooding).  This can be done by logging into the NC Flood Information Management System (FIMAN), which has aerial imagery and digital Flood Insurance Rate Maps superimposed over one another.

4) Sleep and/or hang out on a first floor if in a 2 story home (falling trees can slice through homes). If this is not an option, the center of a home or apartment is best.

5)  Check out ready.gov (as suggested on the UNC website for prep tips).

6) Fill clean containers with water in case the water system goes down (I do this as opposed to buying all those plastic water bottles, which you may have seen are rapidly selling out).

7)  Buy foods you don’t have to cook or refrigerate and have a manual can opener at the ready.  If you have a gas stove, you’re in luck.  If you have a grill, buy another propane take and grill all the stuff in your fridge before it thaws (great way to meet your neighbors).  Use batteries and NOT candles as a light source.

While this may sound a bit over the top, its always better to be overprepared than the reverse.  While power outages are likely to be widespread, you never know who will and won’t have power.

– Dr. Gavin Smith, Research Professor, Director of the Department of Homeland Security Coastal Resilience Center of Excellence

Tracking Updates:

Official: NOAA National Hurricane Center: Hurricane Florence

Social Media: NOAA National Weather Service, National Hurricane Center

Social Media: Local Meteorologist Tim Buckley

Resources:

Address Lookup: North Carolina Flood Risk Information System (Map)

Address Lookup: North Carolina Flood Risk (Map)

Live Feed

View of the Atlantic Coast by Explore Oceans:

 

 

A New Perspective on Resilience: The Importance of Context in Durban, South Africa

June 2, 2016 /

As planners, many of us are familiar with Scott Campbell’s sustainable development triangle, which calls for a balance between ‘Social Justice,’ ‘Economic Growth,’ and’ Environmental Protection’.1 During the planning process, should we focus on bus services that are cheaper and accessible to lower income citizens? Or train lines that produce fewer carbon emissions? Are new developments that revitalize a neighborhood’s economy worth the risk of displacement due to rising property values? Or should retaining the spirit of the community take precedence over economic advancement?

triangle

As two North American university students hailing from Baltimore, Maryland, and Vancouver, Canada, our views of city structures are shaped by our personal experiences with these conflicting priorities. In our quest to expand our perspectives, we discovered the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities Project,  focused on “helping cities around the world become more resilient to the physical, social and economic challenges that are a growing part of the 21st century.” Urban resilience refers here to a city’s ability to bounce back from shocks, that nature of which can vary widely. We felt particularly intrigued by Durban, South Africa, where a 40% unemployment rate, a divided post-apartheid social sphere, and massive housing backlogs create a storm of  sustainable development challenges. We planned interviews with seven key actors in Durban’s resilience challenge, and travelled to the southern hemisphere to meet them and hear their views on Durban’s progress.  

The 100 Resilient Cities project discusses Durban’s issues with flooding, aging infrastructure, and rising sea levels (“100 Resilient Cities, 2016).

The 100 Resilient Cities project discusses Durban’s issues with flooding, aging infrastructure, and rising sea levels (‘100 Resilient Cities’, 2016).

Resilience as a term can be understood in different ways. In engineering, resilience refers to returning back to an original form. Ecological resilience means transforming into a new stable state/equilibrium. Social resilience, on the other hand, is the process of communities and groups withstanding shocks without significant upheaval (Mehmood, 2016, Beilin et al., 2015). Given these variations in meaning, the usefulness of the term in planning depends heavily on how it is understood and enacted in a regionally specific context.

Stakeholders we interviewed in Durban were generally critical of the term resilience. The city’s Chief Resilience Officer described resilience as a “bad word” in Durban because it implies returning to the city’s undesirable status quo. She prefers the word “transformation” to describe the work they do. Dr. Catherine Sutherland of the University of Kwazulu-Natal offered a similar critique, questioning the relevance of planning-focused urban resilience in dealing with informal settlements or traditional Zulu territories, neither of which abide by eThekwini Municipal planning regulations. Dr. Tasmi Quazi of the nonprofit Asiye eTafuleni, which assists informal workers, cautioned that building resilience could become a neoliberal effort to offload government responsibility for supporting the vulnerable onto individuals and communities.

Barbed wire fences and large gates characterize Durban’s urban landscape, for widespread crime necessitates thorough security measures. Photo Credit: Martha Isaacs

Barbed wire fences and large gates characterize Durban’s urban landscape, for
widespread crime necessitates thorough security measures. Photo Credit: Martha Isaacs

The question therefore is whether there is truly a place for resilience planning in the context of Durban’s development. This depends on whether the term, despites its flaws, contributes any new understanding or perspective to city planning. Dr. Aldrich, Co-Director of the Security and Resilience Studies Program at Northeastern University, adamantly advocates for resilience as a relevant concept. He explained to us in an interview over the phone that, previously, disaster planning was only about preparation for extreme events. ‘Resilience,’ as advocated by organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation, pushes us to look instead at long-term characteristics of communities. Dr. Aldrich further argued that the irreversible reality of climate requires planners to drive behavioral change (adaptation), as well as continue mitigation efforts. While ideas about social capital and ecosystem services existed before, resilience brings these concepts together in the framework of planning for disaster – something new and valuable.

Nevertheless, groups such as the Rockefeller Foundation cannot push formulaic resilience plans on cities with contexts vastly different from US cities such as New Orleans and New York City. Indeed, planners in Durban expressed frustration with the requirements to fit structured pathways defined by international funders. However, they also spoke highly of the funding and international profile that the Rockefeller Foundation program brings to the city. Durban’s Preliminary Resilience Assessment lauds resilience for its “potential to provide a framework to synergize a range of agendas in a way that increases the probability of cities ‘bouncing forward’ to an improved state” (eThekwini Municipality, p. 18).

We completed several interviews at the City of Durban’s Development and Planning office, analyzing collaboration between the Climate Change and Environmental Protection Department, the Human Settlements Office, and the Energy Office.

We completed several interviews at the City of Durban’s Development and Planning office, analyzing collaboration between the Climate Change and Environmental Protection Department, the Human Settlements Office, and the Energy Office. Photo Credit: Martha Isaacs

Resilience can be used as a framework to tackle issues in Durban including poor social capital, crumbling physical infrastructure, and degradation of biodiversity. The concept links separate objectives – dealing with drug use, decreasing crime and fortification, providing better services to informal settlements – to create an integrated strategy with which to approach change and disaster. While we found that ‘resilience’ as a term is not widely supported in Durban, the funding and support from the Rockefeller Foundation have the potential to create real change in the city if, and only if, implemented in deference to regional and political contexts.

Durban’s vibrant street art and informal markets reflect its social capital and cultural richness. Photo Credit: Martha Isaacs

Durban’s vibrant street art and informal markets reflect its social capital and cultural richness. Photo Credit: Martha Isaacs

Footnotes:

  1. Scott Campbell, “Green Cities, Growing Cities, Just Cities? Urban Planning and the Contradictions of Sustainable Development,” Journal of the American Planning Association (1996), accessed April 20, 2016, http://www-personal.umich.edu/~sdcamp/Ecoeco/Greencities.html

About the Authors:

Martha Isaacs is a third year undergraduate studying the Geography of Human Activity and City and Regional Planning. Her current areas of interest include analyzing diversity in communal living and making mass transit more accessible for disabled riders. When not making short films about public spaces or exploring cities through running, she enjoys tea parties, ducklings, and listening to podcasts. 

Ariana Vaisey is a third year Economics and Geography major. She is interested in understanding how the places where we live affect our health and economic opportunity and is writing her senior honors thesis on the spatial distribution of heat-related illness in North Carolina. Growing up in the rain-soaked shadow of British Columbia’s coastal mountains, Ariana’s favorite sound is the patter of rain on skylights.

Best Masters Project, 2015

April 15, 2016 /

Each year the UNC Department of City and Regional Planning bestows the Best Masters Project Award to a graduating Masters student. Mikey Goralnik was the 2015 recipient of the award. Below is an excerpt of his Masters Project titled “Resource Resiliency: preparing rural America for an uncertain climatic future through community design and ecosystem service provision.” A link to his entire project is provided at the end of this post.

In 2012, Hurricane Sandy made landfall in New York City and nearby urban areas in New Jersey. In response to the second costliest natural disaster in the US since 1900, President Barack Obama unveiled the Rebuild by Design Competition, likely the largest federal investment in resiliency. Six international transdisciplinary teams will share $920 million to design and implement infrastructural improvements throughout coastal New York and New Jersey that are massive in physical scale, temporal scope, and international renown.

Just as the mainstream public is likely familiar with the impacts of Hurricane Sandy on metropolitan New York, planners and designers from various disciplines are likely aware of the responses to the disaster that have been mobilized from these fields. However, neither group is likely aware that Hurricane Sandy left the same percentage of customers without power in hyper-urban New York as it did in largely rural West Virginia and New Hampshire. Voters and designers are also likely unfamiliar with rural Vermont’s ongoing struggle to recover from Tropical Storm Irene, where four to eight inches of rainfall caused nearly every river and stream in the state to flood, isolating much of Vermont’s non-urban population—many without power—for weeks. And designers and the public-at-large are almost definitely unfamiliar with the story of rural Kinston, North Carolina, where unprecedented rainfall from successive hurricanes caused the Neuse River to jump its banks, flooding a low-lying neighborhood, uprooting a historically close-knit African American population, and challenging a community to plan and design for resilience in a changing climate.

For the millions of Americans who do not live in cities, promoting more resilient planning and design decisions in rural areas remains a critical and under-examined endeavor, one that is literally a question of life or death. What can planners and designers do to achieve a more resilient physical environment in the distant, often isolated communities of the US? This project seeks to answer that question in Kinston, NC. First, I take an ecosystem services-based approach to redesigning nearly 750 acres of publicly-owned land along the Neuse River. By leveraging an asset common to all rural communities—lightly or undeveloped land—I examine methods of monetizing the ecosystem functions that naturally occur on the site. After establishing a baseline value for the site’s current ecosystem service provision, I design a masterplan for the site that both optimizes those ecosystem services and reimagines the site as an amenity for the community.

Goralnik Visual 1

Goralnik Visual 2aResults and Conclusions

Comparing the credits to the debits yields a net gain of $4,700/year of social value in transitioning to the new scheme. Given the rough approximations involved in sample-based ecosystem service modeling, a difference this small suggests that redesigned scheme would essentially provide the same quantifiable ecosystem services as the undeveloped status quo, which also means that the new scheme could be expected to receive the same amount of compensatory mitigation wetland credits as the current state would. Based on this analysis, the developed masterplan scenario could receive $36,000-$63,000 in actual, spendable wetland credits, while also serving as a public amenity to the community of Kinston.

Furthermore, as a public amenity, the site would then be able to generate social value, if not actual revenue, through added ecosystem services. For example, given that the site is currently both undeveloped and inaccessible by the public, any recreational activity that would accrue to the redesigned site would be additional recreational activity. Not only does this type of physical activity boost community morale, but it also avoids social costs like healthcare subsidy and hospital operation by promoting healthy lifestyles. Improved recreational facilities like those proposed in the masterplan scenario could also attract tourism dollars to Kinston, thereby stimulating the local economy.

Overall, what this analysis indicates is that financially productive, contextually sensitive, and legally permissible floodplain design is eminently possible in rural North Carolina. By prioritizing revenue generation through ecosystem service provision, planners and designers can implement landscapes that, from an economic perspective, work for their community.

Click here: Mikey Goralnik, Best Masters Project, 2015

Carolina Planning, the oldest student-run planning publication in the country, is produced once a year in UNC's Department of City and Regional Planning. Articles selected for the journal are written by academics and practitioners, covering a wide range of topics relevant to today’s planning challenges.

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